Storage media (e.g., a hard magnetic disc) may be divided into a number of physical sectors for storing data (e.g., 512 byte sectors). One or more of the physical sectors may be rendered unreadable either due to physical defects on a storage medium or a desire to avoid reading and/or writing data from that physical sector on the storage medium.
Advanced format storage media may utilize larger physical sectors for storing data (e.g., 4096-byte, or 4K-byte sectors). As a result, a corresponding storage drive may map multiple host blocks to a single physical sector on the storage medium within the drive (e.g., eight 512-byte host blocks are mapped to a 4K-byte sector). One or more sub-sectors associated with the host blocks mapped to the single physical sector may be rendered unreadable. However, conventionally marking the entire physical sector of the storage medium may waste valuable storage space within the physical sector that is otherwise readable.